Tom King’s CRM Plus --
Ruminations on "cultural resource management," environmental impact assessment, and related esoteric topics, by a curmudgeon who seldom has anything good to say about anything.

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Monday, August 12, 2013

National Register Bulletin 38 is Doomed

Twenty-three years ago, the National Register of Historic
Places published National Register Bulletin 38, on the identification,
evaluation, and documentation of “traditional cultural properties” (TCPs).Patricia Parker and I had authored the
bulletin a couple of years earlier; the story of its creation comprises Chapter
Two of my 2003 Places That Count (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780759100701).

We wrote NRB 38 to counteract a trend then apparent in
American historic preservation – the devaluation of places valued by communities
in favor of those valued by professional elites (notably architectural
historians and archaeologists).Archaeological sites and buildings of architectural interest were being
afforded all the (admittedly dubious) protections of federal law, while
traditional neighborhoods and places of spiritual significance to tribes and
Native Hawaiians were given short shrift.NRB 38 has done some good in leveling the playing field; tribes have
made particularly skillful use of it in litigation.

The National Register is now embarked on a campaign to do
something to or with NRB 38.If its
people know what they want to do, or why they want to do it, they are not
sharing this intelligence with the rest of us, but they are earnestly holding webinars
at which they read Powerpoint slides and ask for input.

Until recently I was more amused than concerned about the
Register’s effort; it looked like simply a way for its people to look busy
while they wait for retirement and I didn’t think it would amount to much.After the latest webinar, though – into which
I didn’t plug, but about which I’ve heard a good deal from outraged
participants – I am much more pessimistic.

There are interests – notably among the extractive
industries and in those industries’ traditional handmaidens, the Bureau of Land
Management and Forest Service – who very much dislike NRB 38 and would like to
clip its wings.They’ve grown
sufficiently used to archaeology, and co-opted enough archaeologists, to make
the identification and handling of archaeological sites a fairly routine
matter.You find them, you draw lines
around them, you evaluate them as insignificant if you can, and if any of them
are so significant you can’t pretend they’re not, you dig them up.It costs money sometimes, but it’s
predictable; it seldom raises issues that can actually threaten your
plans.Old buildings are usually even easier to
manage; find them, document their architecture, knock them down or move them
away.All this can usually be worked out
with the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO), with minimum involvement
by anyone less tractable.

TCPs are different; they’re often quite large (whole
mountains, lakes, landscapes, seascapes) and ill-bounded, and their values are
perceived mostly by plain people, in more or less local communities.These people tend not to want their special
places to be screwed up, and they’re seldom as easy or cheap to buy off as are
archaeologists or architectural historians, or as easy to flim-flam as is the
average SHPO.So it would be easier to
put in mines, railroads, solar farms, wind farms, power plants and transmission
lines if TCPs were not regarded as eligible for the National Register.Failing that, it would benefit the industries
and simplify the lives of agency bureaucrats and SHPOs if the rules for
recognizing a TCP could be made more like those for recognizing an
archaeological site.If, for example, it
were necessary to establish hard and fast boundaries, show that there are physical
expressions of something “cultural” (artifacts, structures) on the ground,
document that people have been using the place consistently for over fifty
years for some professionally definable cultural purpose.

And this, I now fear, is what the National Registrars will
do – not with any particular malice, but because they’re just too
inexperienced, too gullible, too naïve to recognize what’s wrong with such
notions.They’ve made it very clear that
they think it quite inappropriate, even impossible, to consider the real world
implications of what they do.Think
about how a tweak here and a tinker there will play out in land use planning,
or environmental review?No, no, that’s
for people like the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) to think
about; what the National Register does is – well, register stuff.

So what they’re likely to do is tweak and tinker with NRB 38
to make it more like some of their other bulletins, tightly oriented toward how
to fill out nomination forms.On page X,
in block Y, select from the following three options: M, N, or O.I can imagine, too, an effort to define words
like “community” to exclude any group that isn’t or can’t be somehow formally
recognized by officialdom.So the Big
Sky Historical Society can have TCPs but an informal group of cattle ranchers
can’t; so a federally recognized tribe can but an unrecognized tribe can’t.

The result will be to make it harder – if not impossible –
for a community or tribe to get its special places recognized as
Register-eligible, and hence deserving of consideration under Section 106 of
the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).This narrow-mindedness will inevitably bleed over into practice under
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other federal and state
laws.No matter that the place is of
deep cultural importance to people on the ground; if you can’t fill out the
nomination form the way the registrars want it filled out, and justify its
importance in the esoteric language of history, archaeology, or maybe cultural
anthropology, your place just doesn’t qualify.This may generate business for certain specialized consultants, but it
will do nothing for the places that tribes and other communities hold
dear.

Nor will it do anything for the National Register’s
relevance to the real world, but I doubt if that’s important to the Register’s
staff; they like irrelevance; it’s a safe condition.

Several commenters have told NPS what would actually be
helpful.Don’t focus on the
clerical niceties of nomination; instead advise government agencies and other
change agents about how to address TCPs in planning and decision making.Take it as given that if a place is important
to a community – including a self-defined community – it’s the obligation of a
government that’s supposed to be by and for the people to give that place
careful consideration before doing something to it.Talk with the people who value it, deliberate
with them about ways to protect its significance while realizing whatever public
interest is served by the decisions that will affect it.See what can be done to put such protections
in place and make them work.

But that kind of thing, the registrars point out, isn’t
their game; it’s supposedly the game of the ACHP.Fair enough, though the ACHP has largely
abandoned the field of play.So maybe
the registrars ought to talk with the ACHP, maybe share the effort.Or maybe they should satisfy themselves with
clarifying a few unfortunate word choices and dated assumptions in the Bulletin
and leave any further guidance on the subject to the ACHP, the Council on
Environmental Quality (CEQ) or some other entity that actually relates to reality.I don’t expect them to exercise such
broadmindedness or restraint, however.They have convinced themselves that the National Register is the
indispensable centerpiece of the nation’s historic preservation program, so
only they can correct NRB 38’s deficiencies – whatever they are.

A number of people have asked me what they can do about the
Register’s threatened fixes – besides filing eloquent comments, as many have
done, and waiting for them to be misunderstood, ignored, or both.The only recommendation I’ve been able to
come up with is to take the matter up with higher levels in the Department of
the Interior food chain.I don’t know
that this is a particularly hopeful option – the Obama administration has done
little but disappoint in matters like this – but it is just possible that if
the Secretary of the Interior were made aware of what is being done in her name
by her minions at the National Register, her people would give the registrars a
little adult oversight.Of course, the
Secretary is under orders from our keen-minded president to “greenlight” energy
projects on the public lands, and hang the environmental laws, so expecting
responsibility from her for the cultural environment is probably a fruitless
enterprise.What’s sad is that there’s
not necessarily a conflict between energy development and taking care of the
places that matter to people.What
creates conflict are government policies that encourage change agents to ignore
the impacts of their actions on anything their own experts can’t weigh and
measure using finely calibrated professional (or other) procedures – regardless
of what those affected think is important.
People who value places that professional practitioners can't appreciate or registrars assign easly to pigeonholes are left with nothing to do but fume, demonstrate, and litigate. NRB 38 was designed to help create conditions in which such conflicts
could be identified early and resolved by consensus; what the registrars seem to be about will, I fear,
have the opposite effect.

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Welcome to Tom King's CRM Plus

Welcome to my blog on topics related to "cultural resource management," whatever that may mean to you or me. I hope you find some interest in what you read here, that you'll add your own contributions, and that you'll encourage others to have a look. Thanks!

About Me

Thomas F. King holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California Riverside (1976), and has worked since the 1960s in the evolving fields of research and management variously referred to as heritage, cultural resource management, and historic preservation. He is particularly known for his work with Section 106 of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act, and with indigenous and other traditional cultural places.

King is the author and editor of ten textbooks and tradebooks (See http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-F.-King/e/B001IU2RWK/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1353864454&sr=1-2-ent) as well as scores of journal articles, popular articles, and internet offerings on heritage topics.His career includes the conduct of archaeological research in California and the Micronesian islands, management of academy-based and private cultural resource consulting organizations, helping establish government historic preservation systems in the freely associated states of Micronesia, oversight of U.S. government project review for the federal government’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, service as a litigant and expert witness in heritage-related lawsuits, and extensive work as a consultant and educator in heritage-related topics. He is the co-author of the U.S. National Park Service's government-wide guidance on "traditional cultural properties" (TCPs; see http://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/pdfs/nrb38.pdf). He occasionally teaches short classes about historic preservation project review, traditional cultural places, and consultation with indigenous groups, and consults and writes as TFKing PhD LLC. Current major clients include several American Indian tribes and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.